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Kernel

A certain Linus Torvalds has appeared on the recently launched Google Plus service. While there are many indications that the account is authentic, there is, of course, no certain way of telling whether it really is Torvalds…

In a blog posting, Suse developer Michal Marek describes various improvements to libzypp; from OpenSuse 12.1, these changes will reportedly allow developers to determine which of the old kernels will be removed after a kernel update.

Graphics hardware support

NVIDIA has released version 275.19 of its proprietary Linux graphics drivers (x86-32, x86-64); the new version fixes various bugs and supports the GeForce GT 540M. NVIDIA has also released the 280.04 beta drivers that offer "preliminary" support for X Server 1.11, which is still in development.

Hand de Goede has released the first "official" version of usbredir, which allows individual USB devices to be passed through to other systems – such as virtual machines. With this version 0.3, the current USB Redirection Protocol API has been frozen, but extensions will still be possible.

Lennart Poettering has submitted for discussion various patches that extend the X Server's multi-seat support; these improvements are based on functions included in systemd from version 30 to support systems with multiple active users.

In part 9 of his "Systemd for Administrators" blog series, Poettering describes problems that exist when configuring systems via files in the /etc/sysconfig (Red Hat, SUSE, ...) and /etc/default (Debian) directories; in this context, the developer discusses some solutions he considers superior. Part 2 of the "Systemd for Developers" series explains the socket activation concept in more detail, using Cups as an example.

On his blog, David Zeuthen has released a five-part article series titled "Writing a C library" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

The libvirt developers have released version 0.9.3 of their library for accessing different virtualisation solutions.

The KVM blog describes various characteristics of the QED (Qemu Enhanced Disk Format) file system, which is still in development.

LKML discussions

Nao Nishijima has submitted revised versions of his patches that allow storage media to be given aliases that won't change after a reboot or hardware modification. The approach continues to be controversial; LWN.net had described the problems with an earlier patch series in an article.

Nancy Yuen has submitted various BadRAM implementations used by Google to the LKML. Several developers had expressed their interest in these patches after Google developers had criticised that Stefan Assmann's BadRAM patches, mentioned in the previous Kernel Log, are not flexible enough for Google's purposes.

New editions of Kernel Logs are also mentioned on Identi.ca and Twitter by @kernellog2. The Kernel Log author also posts updates about various topics on Identi.ca and Twitter as @kernellogauthor.